I’ve requested this meeting because I’ve noticed a concerning trend: It doesn’t seem like you’re reading my mind. This is quite troubling because tasks I’ve never mentioned before are falling through the cracks. All of this could be avoided if you quit relying on written or verbal requests and started showing some initiative. Failure to magically know what I want simply isn’t going to fly.
I just can’t keep reminding you to do things I haven’t told you about. I don’t know how many warnings I’ve given you now. How many have there been? You should be keeping track of this. This is the problem right here. Why aren’t you anticipating?
At first, I thought this could just be a simple oversight. Maybe you were accidentally reading somebody else’s mind. Maybe you were reading Jerry’s. But after repeatedly dropping unmentioned deadlines, being unprepared for unscheduled meetings, and not bringing me ice cream that time it got really hot, I knew we had a serious issue. You are always blissfully unaware of what I want, even after I roll my eyes and say something like, “Would somebody please bring me an ice cream cone?” You then have the audacity to ask questions like what flavor I want. I can’t keep doing your job for you.
Your lack of mind reading is now leading you to ask incessant questions. Questions about what I want, or what I mean by that, or “Are you sure, because that’s completely opposite of what you said to me last time” need to stop. Further clarifications unnecessarily hold up our workflow. When you ask if I’d rather do X or Y, “yes” is a crystal clear answer.
If you really can’t read my mind, you should have disclosed that disability in your application. Now what am I supposed to do? I’m all for reasonable accommodations, but there’s nothing reasonable about forcing me to communicate what I want.
How can I be expected to put my thoughts into words? How could I possibly distill the free-form nature of the human mind into a linguistic box? How about this: Sometimes you do things not how I had pictured, and that is bad. Sometimes you do things how I pictured, but now I don’t like it, so it is bad. Sometimes I don’t know what I want at all, but after I see what you did, I know it’s completely wrong and bad, and now I am very angry. Instead, try not to do things bad. Is that helpful?
I’d like to know how you’ll address the fact that you aren’t reading my mind in the future. Perhaps medication? Perhaps you could start by pursuing an extremely invasive surgery? Maybe in your free time you could take some sort of night classes with a local mystic? Whatever you end up doing, I hope you began last week because that’s when I think you should have started. If you haven’t, I will be very condescending about how obvious it was that you should have done that.
But once you can read my mind, don’t do it too much. I want you to read my mind, but within reason. It would be an invasion of privacy to, say, use the ability to see how much I’m paying you compared to your coworkers, or divine that sometimes when I say I have a phone meeting I’m actually taking naps under my desk, or reach into the deepest corners of my psyche and find that through a series of oversights, you don’t have health insurance. Again, these are things you shouldn’t read my mind about.
Moving forward, I hope you can incorporate my constructive feedback into actionable change. I want you to do better not only to make my life easier, but also so that you aren’t yelled at by me. So please do better, but if you have any issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out. After all, I’m not a mind reader.
